Meet the 17 executives in Google CEO Sundar Pichai's trusted inner circle who are leading the company's most critical businesses

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Former Oracle executive Thomas Kurian was named Google's new Cloud chief in November 2018, and is chasing ambitious goals as he pushes Google's enterprise business to catch rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

"You will see us competing much more aggressively," he said just several weeks into his tenure. Insider recently reported that Kurian wants to hit $34 billion in annual revenue by 2023.

Kurian succeeded Diane Greene, who insiders say had more of an engineering focus, and who reportedly left after tensions with other executives.

"Kurian is a move back to a sales-oriented culture at the top," said one person who worked with both Greene and Kurian. "That will probably help break through in markets that have been historically skeptical of Google within the enterprise."

In September, Kurian reshuffled the ranks inside Cloud in an effort to move faster, putting more power beneath Brad Calder, who now oversees all of Google Cloud's technical teams.

Fun fact: Thomas has a twin brother named George, who is the CEO of NetApp.

In 2015, just months before the company morphed into Alphabet, Ruth Porat left financial firm Morgan Stanley to join Google as its new chief financial officer.

The timing of Porat's arrival was not a coincidence, and since the reorganization she has continued to serve as CFO for both Google and Alphabet, making her one of the most important figures inside the internet company's empire.

Porat controls the purse strings and headcount for a company with more than 150,000 full-time employees. Her purview extends to Alphabet's "Bet" companies — the hodgepodge of subsidiary businesses focused on autonomous driving, biotech, drones, and more.

Porat has introduced more fiscal discipline into the company over the years, reigning in some of the company's more indulgent money-bleeding projects. The results speak for themselves: Alphabet continues to be incredibly profitable, and was the third US company to surpass a $2 trillion market cap in 2021.

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As senior VP for Global Affairs and Google's Chief Legal Officer, Kent Walker is Google's top lawyer. 

Walker advises Google's leadership team on legal and policy issues that involve everything from company acquisitions to antitrust investigations. Bloomberg once called Walker "the most powerful person in tech you've never heard of." 

Walker, along with a handful of outside lawyers, is now mounting Google's very public defense against a bombardment of antitrust lawsuits.

Before joining Google in 2006, the Stanford Law School graduate held top legal roles at eBay and at internet browser pioneer Netscape. In a strange twist of fate, he also did a five-year stint in the US Department of Justice.

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For the past few years, Rick Osterloh has been attempting to wrangle Google's various hardware efforts – phones, laptops, wearables – into one cohesive vision.

The former president of Motorola Mobility, who Google hired back in 2016 to lead its hardware division, has perhaps most notably helped grow Google's own brand of Pixel smartphones into a household name.

In 2018, Osterloh also took charge of Nest, once an independent company bought by Google and placed in a silo under Alphabet before it was absorbed back into the Google mothership. Last year, Fitbit officially became part of Google, rolled under Osterloh.

The pressure is on for Osterloh to prove that Google deserves to be taken seriously as a hardware player, but some notable departures from the team over the last year and an uneven rollout of products suggest the group is still finding its groove.

Osterloh is overseeing the launch of Google's first smartwatch, which is scheduled to land sometime in 2022, Insider previously reported.

Prabhakar Raghavan is responsible for Search, Ads, maps, commerce, and the Google Assistant — the company's most valuable businesses — and a collective headcount of more than 20,000. He could be described as Google's de facto CEO.

Raghavan was tapped for the top job in June 2020 as part of a major reshuffle. Since then, he's improved communication between teams and given more priority to product managers in an effort to streamline decision-making and move faster.

Prabhakar previously led Google's ads and commerce team, and before that was in charge of G Suite in Google Cloud.

Before Google, Raghavan founded Yahoo Labs and led the company's search strategy, not to mention that he's published various books and papers on the subject, including a book co-authored with Rajeev Motwani called "Randomized Algorithms."

Oh, and if you follow him on Twitter, don't expect him to be very active. His Twitter handle is an anagram for "I don't tweet."

Google IO 2017/YouTube

A founding member of the Android team, Lockheimer oversees Google's range of mobile products including Android, Chrome, Chrome OS, and Play.

He joined the company in 2006, after Google acquired Android, where he served as executive director and later VP of engineering. In 2015, Google's freshly minted CEO, Sundar Pichai, who once led Chrome and Chrome OS development himself, appointed Lockheimer as SVP of Google's mobile software efforts.

Pichai's prior history working on Chrome means this is an area the Google chief is particularly close to.

Lockheimer is also leading the charge on a new OS called Fuchsia, an open-source sort-of blend of Android and Chrome OS, which was released earlier this year on the company's Nest Hub. Google plans to roll it out to other devices in the future.

Reed Saxon/AP

Susan Wojcicki is the CEO of Google's hugely successful YouTube. She's also a member of the old-school Google elite — it was Wojcicki's garage where Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin built their first office in 1998.

It was also Wojcicki who proposed Google buy YouTube in 2006 for $1.56 billion. If it was a standalone company, YouTube could now be worth a staggering $1 trillion, one analyst recently said.

But the challenges for YouTube have piled up in recent years, as the platform has struggled with an influx of toxic content and controversies that have led it to create more structural framework to how it forms policy.

YouTube enjoys a semiautonomous status within Google, with its own campus in San Bruno, California, 30 miles north of the Googleplex. Wojcicki's top-ranking lieutenants form "RNSS" — Insider recently mapped out the most powerful people in the org.

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Lorraine Twohill joined Google in 2003 as the company's first marketing hire outside of the US, and quickly rose through the ranks to lead the company's marketing division.

Twohill, who also created Google's in-house advertising agency Creative Lab, has her own wide range of reports across Google products, from Search to Chrome.

"She's humanized Google with Super Bowl Sunday ads," Insider wrote of Twohill in its list of the most innovative CMOs of 2020.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Twohill has worked with the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to promote official health information across Google's products.

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Formerly AstraZeneca's chief human resource officer, Fiona Cicconi joined Google as its new HR chief at the start of 2021, and she certainly arrived with her work cut out for her.

Cicconi now oversees a sprawling workforce of over 150,000 full-time employees (and around the same number of temps, vendors and contractors), who have been working remotely now for nearly two years.

2021 began with hundreds of employees forming the first Alphabet union, and holding down attrition rates and addressing concerns about the future of hybrid work have kept Cicconi busy through the last year.

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Another early member of the company, Ben Gomes joined Google in 1999 where he was tasked with, among other things, scaling Google's "PageRank" beyond 25 million pages.

Gomes has been described as Google's search czar. "I think of Ben as our diplomat," Marissa Mayer once said during her Google tenure. However, it wasn't until 2018 that Gomes was appointed head of Google's Search business.

Last year, Gomes has transitioned to a new role overseeing Google's education and learning products. Gomes is working to tie together the company's various efforts in that space, and has been behind Google's push to build up its Meet and Classroom products through the pandemic.

"Ben has always had a deep interest in education innovation, and we're excited to see him build on our work here," said CEO Sundar Pichai when announcing Gomes' new role in June 2020.

Gomes remains a technical advisor on Search, assisting Prabhakar Raghavan, and continues to work closely with Google.org on corporate philanthropy, the company said.

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Jen Fitzpatrick, who joined Google via its internship program in 1999, was one of the first 30 employees at the company. She was also one of Google's first women engineers.

Fitzpatrick has led teams on Search, Google News, shopping, and AdWords. In 2014, she was appointed VP for Geo, overseeing the entire Google Maps business.

Last year, Fitzpatrick moved out of Geo to lead the company's core engineering teams, overseeing more than 8,000 employees.

"Jen's deep product knowledge and experience focusing on important areas such as privacy will set her up well to lead these teams," Pichai said at the time.

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Jeffrey Dean is a Google Senior Fellow and leads the company's AI division. Another long-time employee, Dean has been with the company since 1999 and has earned a reputation for his exceptional coding talent. He joined Google's X lab in 2011 to work on deep neural networks.

That eventually led to the creation of Google Brain, the company's research group which lives in the company's wider Research group, which Dean oversees.

Dean was appointed the head of Google's entire AI division in 2018 during a leadership reshuffle, which spun AI into its own business. Not everything has succeeded – Google's Health group was dismantled last year following the departure of its leader David Feinberg.

Dean also became a target of protest in late 2020 after the company pushed out AI researcher Timnit Gebru, and later fired her colleague Margaret Mitchell.

Google's chief business officer has been extremely busy of late, as the company has tried to fend off the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on its ads business. Good thing for Google, it's bounced back rather well.

Schindler, who joined Google in 2005, took the role of chief business officer when Google restructured itself under Alphabet in 2015. Not just the face of Google's advertising business, Schindler also weighs in on everything from Google News to the company's moonshots.

Schindler, who was born in Germany, is a veteran of the early dot-com days, having worked at AOL and CompuServe during the 1990s.

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When it comes to Google's communications, the buck stops with Corey duBrowa. After stints shaping the PR strategy for Starbucks and Salesforce, duBrowa joined Alphabet in 2018 to help build the company's brand.

Corey duBrowa has a direct line to Pichai and wrangles a team of more than 200 staffers. Early on in his Google tenure, duBrowa introduced "objectives and key results" (OKRs) for the company communications team – something Pichai uses with his own direct reports.

"For years, Google was data-rich and analysis poor," duBrowa told listeners during an interview at a Holmes Report event last year. "We're in the process of building the kind of analytics engine and team to help us be more precise." 

And if you happen to come across Corey duBrowa's bylines in Rolling Stone and GQ, that's because he was also a music journalist in a past life.

Google

Like Jen Fitzpatrick, Ben Smith joined Google in 1999 through the company's internship program. He was so enamored with the company at the time that he left his graduate program to join Google's Search efforts full-time — and has remained with Google ever since.

Smith is a member of the old guard, and a technical advisor to the office of the CEO, although he's much less in the public eye than other members of Pichai's squad.

Google

Tom Oliveri joined Google in 2005 where he worked on Google's first payment service, before transitioning to lead marketing for various Google products, eventually overseeing marketing for Chrome and Android in a VP role.

Oliveri is currently a VP of the CEO team and, insiders say, a particularly close confidant of Pichai's. Oliveri's reports include "other bets" portfolio manager Anil Patel and Jeff Markowitz, who joined Google as a talent advisor in 2019.

In early 2021, a new team named Google Labs was formed to lead more forward-looking projects such as virtual and augmented reality. Area 120, Google's experimentation lab, is now a part of Labs, as is the ultra-real videoconferencing Project Starline.

Bavor, who previously led work on VR and AR at Google, is leading the new team, and TechCrunch reported that he'll be reporting directly to Sundar Pichai. Insider has confirmed that Bavor has not been made an SVP, and it's not known if he's yet considered a "Lead."